The secret to being a great mom when your daugther is a model

I am the mother of a model. I am proud of my daughter and I helped her grow and find her way. I’m born in ’63, I work in a small firm and married for 27 years with 2 daughters. The eldest is a true scholar and has recently moved abroad for work, the youngest one instead has never been particularly studious so from high-school I felt genuinely worried about how this would influence her future. As a mom I felt compelled to guide her towards what I thought could be a right path for her. She was tall, thin and beautiful even as a child, so one day I found myself surfing the internet looking for information on how to become a model. I knew nothing of this world and I must admit I was a bit scared. However, I was convinced that it could be her way and so I began to search for information about: how to get started and who to turn to.

I always tried to encourage my daughter since she was a little girl to play sports. Being the tallest among her peers I initially tried to suggest basketball or volleyball but unfortunately with little success. This was because coordination was not her strong suit. So then we tried with dance, gymnastics, athletics, swimming … but in the end I had to give up the sport idea because it was clearly not meant to be. If neither sport nor study worked well enough, I thought maybe she could use her physical qualities in another way, possibly on a catwalk.

Like all mothers, I will always look at my daughter with love and in my eyes she’ll always be the most beautiful of princesses but even friends told me – she’s so tall and beautiful that she could be a model. At first I gave little weight to these comments but then thinking about it I began to really see an opportunity. That’s when I started writing some emails to agencies in Milan requesting information and opinions to experts in the field. I had many positive replies from agencies that were interested in her. This made me very happy but also worried. I knew basically nothing about that environment. So I was saying to myself, how could I guide her and give advices in a world so foreign and different from the one I knew?!

When my daughter started working with her first agency we had to learn everything from scratch. We knew nothing about “fitting”, “showroom” or “shooting” so we dealt with it one small step at a time and the more she grew and progressed in this world, the more we discovered things that we could have never imagined. Fashion is much more complex than it appears to be and the model’s job is much more varied than plain shootings or runways.

The real secret to being the mom of a model is to never give up on your daughter although your worlds can be very different and far away from each other, being always there for her is crucial. My home will always be a place of refuge for my daughters no matter what happens.

I don’t know what the future holds because this type of work is not forever. Beauty fades, time passes and my daughter’s ambitions will change … but for now I’m happy about what this experience taught her: responsibility, maturity and sense of value. In a world where everything is shallow and based on aesthetics it is crucial to understand what the true values in life are and I will be here to guide my daughter along the way as I’ve always done because a mom should be a guide, an example and a friend.